Battle for Haditha: A remarkable film about
the Iraq war

By David Walsh
9 May 2008

Directed by Nick Broomfield, written by Broomfield, Marc Hoeferlin and Anna
TelfordNick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha is opening in New York City this
week. This comment on the film was originally posted as part of the coverage of
the 2007 Toronto film festival.

Battle for Haditha is a genuine achievement. Nick Broomfield’s film is an
effort to reconstruct the events and circumstances leading up to the massacre of
24 men, women and children by US marines in the Iraqi city of Haditha in
November 2005.

The film, a dramatization of the episode, first follows the various
participants—marines, Iraqi civilians, insurgents—as they go about their daily
routines the day before the killings.
Local women with their children buy chickens for a party. A youngish Iraqi
couple is focused on. The American marines patrol the city, expecting an attack
from any quarter. They carry out raids, knocking down doors, terrifying and
outraging the inhabitants. Their banter among themselves is coarse and
super-aggressive. Two insurgents, one of them a former member of the Iraqi army,
obtain an IED (improvised explosive device) and receive instructions on
triggering it, by means of a cell-phone.
A good deal of the film, including perhaps its most memorable portions, is
devoted to the processes which make the marines capable of carrying out their
murderous assault. Battle for Haditha begins with one marine musing out
loud, “I don’t why I’m here,” and expressions of alienation and demoralization
continue throughout. “The marine corps don’t care, the country doesn’t care,” we
hear. The individual marine has to learn to “act like a machine.” The Iraqis are
“ragheads.” The marines chant, “Train, train, train, to kill, kill, kill.” They
are indoctrinated to suspect and fear everyone: “This is a hostile environment.”
Women and children, they’re told, are capable of carrying bombs.
We see an Iraqi man carrying a shovel over his shoulder. Someone claims he could
be on his way to planting an IED; permission is granted, the man is blown to
bits.

Meanwhile, Corporal Ramirez (Elliot Ruiz) is having nightmares and can’t sleep.
He asks to see someone, a doctor. He’s told: not until your tour of duty is
over. He explains he’s having bad dreams about the things he’s seen. Again: no
doctor till your tour of duty’s finished.

It’s Ramirez who will lead the enraged attack on defenseless men, women and
children when one of his favorites in the unit is blown up in a Humvee. The
scenes of the massacre are chillingly and convincingly done; Broomfield bases
them on eyewitness accounts from both Americans and Iraqis. After the IED goes
off under the convoy, killing the one marine, a higher-up is consulted. His
comment—“Take whatever action is necessary. I don’t want any more marines
killed”—unleashes the atrocity.

Ramirez and his marines have already pulled a group of Iraqi men from a taxi
stopped nearby and executed them. The families the film has been following have
the misfortune to live in the houses near the IED attack. While the insurgents
who planted the bomb are able to get away from their rooftop position, the
marines burst into homes and kill the civilians, including small children, in
cold blood.

After the initial killings, in one of the most horrifying sequences, marine
snipers laugh and joke as they pick off a man running through a field. He’s the
husband of the young Iraqi couple we’ve met before. His wife kneels over his
body, hysterical. Ramirez offers her his hand, she spits at him. He goes and
vomits. Later, in front of the other marines, though, he pretends to be fine. An
officer leads prayers.

The next day, in his quarters, Ramirez suffers a kind of breakdown. The
nightmares have continued. He keeps seeing bodies, women with kids. I have “to
live with this guilt for the rest of my life ... I hate the officers who sent us
in ... They don’t give a f—- about us,” he shouts.

The leader of the insurgents is pleased. “The Americans lost the battle ...
Everyone is with us and we control the city.”
In a prologue, Ramirez is under arrest, charged with murder. The officer whose
orders triggered the massacre presides over his fate. In a dreamlike sequence,
Ramirez takes the hand of a small girl who survived the attack—two victims of
the imperialist occupation of Iraq.

The film contains a number of remarkable and powerful scenes. It is not
artistically perfect. Perhaps understandably, the writing of the Iraqi sections
is somewhat weaker, a bit more schematic. Although Battle for Haditha was
made with Iraqi actors (some of them professional stage actors) in Jordan, the
filmmakers no doubt had a greater challenge in putting themselves in the shoes
of ordinary Iraqis, much less fighters against the American occupation. The
sinister figure of the ‘sheikh,’ the local leader of the insurgents, seems
especially speculative.
All things considered, however, Broomfield and his collaborators have done an
astonishing job. Best known for offbeat documentaries in which his own
personality occasionally seemed to take center stage (Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood
Madam, Kurt and Courtney, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial
Killer), Broomfield has apparently opened a new chapter in his career.

The Guardian’s Paul Hoggart in a piece entitled “Mr. Wry gets serious,”
cites the comments of Peter Dale of Britain’s Channel 4, which funded Battle
for Haditha and Broomfield’s previous work,
Ghosts, about the deaths of 23 Chinese immigrants in Morecambe Bay in
2004: “I think it’s part of a transition in Nick’s work from a slightly wry, off
beat approach to a much more passionate and serious and political approach to
his subject. In his more frivolous documentaries the joke had been wearing a
little thin. Ghosts was a welcome return to form.”

Broomfield took great pains to represent the Haditha events accurately. Twelve
of the performers playing US marines in his film are ex-marines. He also managed
to speak to some of the marines involved in the Haditha incident. He told the
Guardian reporter, “We spent five days in a motel in San Diego interviewing
them for probably 10 hours a day, just to get a sense of their lives and who
they really were. They were very wary to begin with, but once people start
talking, they really talk. The main marine character we focus on was this guy
called Ramirez. The night he got back from Iraq he broke into a truck and
basically had post-traumatic stress and ended up driving into a house. He was
best friends with the guy who was killed by the bomb, and then had the job of
writing numbers on the dead people’s heads and photographing them. They were
extremely tough and had seen a lot of action. They talked about chasing each
other around with people’s legs and kicking people’s brains around.”

The filmmaker also stated that his team met with Iraqi insurgents who claimed to
have been active in Haditha.
Broomfield ended up making the film for Channel 4 because he found no financing
in the US. The Los Angeles Times noted in May 2007 that “Every Hollywood
door he knocked at, he was told it was too soon for such a movie. ‘Everyone’s so
worried,’ said Broomfield ... ‘They all wondered, “Does the American public have
an appetite for this?””

The group of Haditha marines, in their conversations with Broomfield, explained
the “standard operating procedure rules,” in the director’s words, under which
they were operating. He told Time Out magazine, in an interview also
published last May, “If, for example, a house is described as ‘hostile,’ then
you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains
two-year-olds or the elderly, which is what they did in Fallujah—where these
guys had come from. ...

“I realised that these soldiers were very, very poor kids, who had all left
school unbelievably early. It was the first time they had all been out of the
United States. They didn’t speak a word of Iraqi. They had no idea what they
were doing in Iraq, and they felt let down by the marine corps. It was hard to
condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers. ...

“I think there have been lots of Hadithas, and there are lots of Hadithas every
year.... The difference with this event is that the aftermath just happened to
be filmed and now there’s an inquiry. It’s much more convenient for the US
government and the marine corps to make scapegoats of these guys than actually
deal with its policy and rules of engagement in Iraq. I’m sure it happens on a
lesser scale every single day.’”

A conversation with two Iraq war veterans

I spoke to two of the former marines in Broomfield’s film in Toronto. Elliot
Ruiz, born in Philadelphia, plays Corporal Ramirez and Eric Mehalacopoulos, born
in Montreal, Quebec, plays Sergeant Ross. I asked Ruiz about his experiences in
Iraq.

He explained, “I was 17 when I was sent to Iraq, during the initial invasion. We
pushed all the way up to Tikrit and I ended up being wounded, I almost lost my
life. It’s crazy, people don’t know the type of things that we go through.
That’s what I like about the film, it shows that.”

I noted that film showed how the marines were whipped up into a frenzy and
brutalized. I asked the pair if they had helped write or prepare any of the
script.
Ruiz said, “No, but a lot of it was improvisation. Nick [Broomfield] just told
us, ‘This is what’s happening in this scene, this is what I need,’ and mostly
everything was improvised.” Mehalacopoulos added, “We used our experiences as
the basis of it.” I commented, “So what we see is accurate?” Ruiz replied, “Yes.
I asked them both what they would like audiences to draw from the film.

“Like I said earlier,” Ruiz observed, “I just want the audience to take a look
and see what we go through on a day-to-day basis. You might lose a friend, but
you have to keep moving. It’s your job. A lot of people don’t understand that. I
also hope that they see what the Iraqis go through on a day-to-day basis, you
know.”

Mehalacopoulos continued, “As we speak, this is going on. The film only shows a
little bit, there’s so much more to tell. I think it’s a movie that’s going to
make people think, and that’s what important.”

I pointed out to Ruiz that the spectator finds himself horrified by the crimes
Corporal Ramirez commits, but at the end he manages to be a sympathetic
character. “The American soldiers themselves are victims,” I said.
Ruiz: “Exactly.”

Mehalacopoulos: “We were put there. We chose to enlist, and therefore we’re
going to do our job and carry on the mission, and all that’s fine. But you ask
90 percent of the guys, they’d rather not be there.”

I suggested that no marine or soldier guilty of crimes should be absolved.
“Those who are responsible for crimes are responsible for crimes, but the
ultimate responsibility is above.” Mehalacopoulos agreed.

I asked them what they thought the war was about. Mehalacopoulos ventured, “It’s
tricky, because there’s so much stuff that’s hidden from us, I think. A lot of
people say oil. Who knows? It wasn’t what people were told, that wasn’t the real
reason. There was a lot of lying, and that’s what’s not fair. All those families
that lost their sons, brothers, husbands, whatever. It’s not fair. To die for a
rich man’s, a powerful man’s cause. That’s throughout history. Big business ...”

Ruiz went on, “If people saw this, it would change the way a lot of people
think. That’s what I like about this film, it doesn’t hold anything back. It
shows what happens on a day-to-day basis out there.”

Both former marines praised Broomfield. Ruiz said, “Working with him was
wonderful. He stepped back and just let us be us. And that’s what brought the
authenticity to the film.”

I asked Ruiz about the scene of Ramirez’s breakdown, where the character curses
the officers who have obliged him to commit actions he will feel guilty about
for the rest of his life—had this scene been based on his own experiences and
feelings?

“I mean, I was 17, I almost lost my life out there. Who wouldn’t be angry toward
that? Working on this film, and being able to go back to Jordan ... People don’t
understand, we were dropped in a combat zone in an Arab country. The things that
happened to us, of course we felt a certain way toward the Arab people, or the
Iraqi people.
“Going back to Jordan and being able to meet these people, see these people,
live with these people on a day-to-day basis, totally changed my opinion and the
way I thought about them. It was a wonderful experience. I never thought I’d be
able to live with an Iraqi. I lived with an Iraqi. We shared the same bathroom.
We joked around, he ended up being one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my
life, man. He was happy about everything. He didn’t care, it could be the worst
day in the world, and he was happy.”

Mehalacopoulos continued, “It’s a people that’s been through a lot. And a lot
more than anyone in the US probably. And they have so much pride because there’s
so much culture and history, you know, the cradle of civilization, right?”
I noted there had been a propaganda war to paint all Arabs as terrorists. Ruiz
nodded. “It took me going back to Jordan, another Arab country, to realize that.
It’s a shame it took that, but that’s the reality. Thank god I went back to
Jordan and got to spend time with the people and the culture.”

I noted that the Iraqis had every right to resist a foreign army of occupation.
Mehalacopoulos said, “And they’re not going to stop fighting. I knew this from
the beginning, because we got to a hospital in Baghdad. A doctor, a
well-educated man told me, he predicted what was going to happen. He was totally
right, and this was in the first few days of the war. You know what I’m saying?
They know their people better than we do.”